anyone who follows me on tumblr might have seen me wailing and gnashing occasionally about it already

but it turns out that somehow i have become deeply invested in a ship, the majority of the content for which was made 4-6 years ago

in the fandom for a game i don't play

i can't explain how it happened it just kind of happened

but this ship is so fucking dead you guys

this. is morrismith.

from dead by daylight. a horror-themed asymmetrical online multiplayer versus-type game

the premise of which involves matches of 4 survivors versus 1 killer, where the survivors attempt to escape and the killer attempts to kill everyone

it includes a lot of characters, both survivors and killers, from other famous horror franchises, in addition to its own original cast

like. michael myers and freddy krueger and pyramid head and all sorts

the ship consists of:

1) Quentin Smith, who is loosely based on the protagonist of the same name from Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) (i say loosely because they couldnt actually obtain the rights for the actor's likeness, so instead they had to create a character that only somewhat resembles him)

and 2) Frank Morrison, the leader of the 4-person killer team called the Legion

(he usually wears a mask and has his hood up; nearly any design you see for him online is fan-created, because his appearance is technically kind of a mystery)

now. there are absolutely no ingredients in this formula that even remotely resemble other things i like.

so why am i suddenly suffering about it?

shrug

god hates me personally i guess

really i think i can partially trace it back to the specific artist who made the piece i posted above. something about her art style and her frank design set off a chemical reaction in my brain i think

and once i became a little bit invested it became easier to get a little more invested and things just kind of cascaded

anyways this is what frank normally looks like

absolute trash goblin of a character

totally out of left field for me

what do i find compelling about him. aside from the fact that fan artists almost universally draw him as distressingly hot under the mask.

well, it's a little hard to articulate

these are two characters who have no canon interactions whatsoever, in a game where "canon interactions" as a concept are all but absent in the first place

but

something about how, in-universe, the killers are hand-picked by some otherworldly entity from outside space and time and include some of the most brutal, terrifying, and ontologically evil motherfuckers the genre has to offer,

and then there's this group of four kids who killed one guy, in the heat of the moment, because they were caught breaking and entering and they were scared. and before they even have time to process what they did, the entity kidnaps them into the murder dimension and now they are capital k Killers

and like. that's a little bit fucked up if i'm honest

i'm not trying to woobify the legion, exactly, it was still Pretty Bad that they killed that guy, but it's such a wild mismatch between expectations and reality

and they ARE still kids

well, legal adults, barely, but you know what i mean when i say that's still kids

it's just such a tragic premise i can't help but find it compelling

and then on the other end, we have quentin, who...

... i'm gonna be honest with you, chat. i have not seen Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

i've... managed to intuit the broad shape of what happened in there by way of osmosis by now??? but a lot of the details are lost on me

but basically quentin was one of the people stalked by Infamous Murderkiller, Freddy Krueger. and he survived (barely?), but pretty much all of his friends were killed

and then he thought freddy was dead but it turned out he wasn't, and then he gets kidnapped into the murder dimension

apparently freddy attacks you by entering your dreams, so in addition to being deeply traumatized, quentin is also pathologically insomniac, in most fan depictions. i assume this is also true in the film.

anyways. i guess. there's something about the way that these two characters' completely different but complementary personalities and traumas interlock with each other in fan works. it does things in my brain

i forgot to mention it before, but yes, frank is also deeply traumatized even before the murder, as an orphan who got passed around a bunch of different and uniquely dysfunctional/abusive foster families for his entire childhood

all of the legion kind of Went Through It in one way or another, which is part of how they became friends in the first place

anyways this ship seemed to have a heyday roughly between the years of 2019-2021, which i gather to have begun shortly after the legion was added to the game. theres entire geological strata of tumblr ask blogs from that time period in the tag, one of which was the one with that frank design that hooked me in the first place

and even the most recent fics on ao3 havent updated in a year or more, broadly speaking

just my luck that i'd only stumble onto a ship that absolutely lights my brain on fire long after it's effectively dead and everyone else has moved on lmfao

and my brain has not known peace ever since. the end

ok actually i have like zero outlet for this shit so GUESS WHAT i'm back

and i'm turning this plurk into a dumping ground for art

since my tumblr queue is still churning slowly toward posting most of this stuff

LEGION ENSEMBLE

ok trying that again. apparently plurk interprets it as a hyperlink if you do that

apparently this photo is (an artists interpretation of) an actual in-game item. from left to right: susie, julie, frank, joey

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 1 image

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 1 image

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 1 image

Post by @kiwi-peep · 1 image

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 1 image

honestly astounding how much the art of frank-a-mori-son a.k.a. LadyNinaDraws wormed its way into my brain

Tumblr

Post by @kiwi-peep · 3 images

Post by @kiwi-peep · 2 images

oh yeah did you guys know dracula's in this too

Tumblr

FRANK SPECIFICALLY

Reblog by @kiwi-peep · 1 image

Post by @kiwi-peep · 1 image

Post by @kiwi-peep · 5 images

oh this one should have been under Legion Ensemble actually, op includes art of all four

Reblog by @kiwi-peep · 5 images

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 1 image

and now

MORRISMITH

Post by @hello-dreamwalkers · 2 images

Post by @thr3ap3r · 1 image

uh oh, this one's transparent. direct link it is

Post by @solumaris · 1 image

this image is currently my lockscreen wallpaper

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 1 image

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 1 image

and now the source for the image at the top of my plurk, which is currently my main homescreen wallpaper

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 1 image

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 2 images

Reblog by @thetacriterion · 1 image

Post by @hugs-and-stabbies · 1 image

this series of images might hold the essence of what draws me to this ship, besides purely aesthetic interest in the characters

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 3 images

Post by @saturnulysses · 2 images

Post by @hugs-and-stabbies · 1 image

Post by @thr3ap3r · 1 image

Post by @frank-a-mori-son · 1 image